Endling

Ukraine, 2022. Yeva is a solitary, stubborn scientist, drifting through the countryside in her mobile lab, obsessively—and unsuccessfully—trying to breed rare snails. Her family begs her to settle down, marry, and abandon her work. What they don’t know: Yeva already dates, but not for love—she charms Western men on “romance tours,” those who flock to Ukraine seeking submissive brides untouched by modernity, and funnels their money into her research.

Meanwhile, Nastia and her sister Solomiya are running their own con, posing as a would-be bride and her translator while secretly scouring the same industry for clues to their missing mother, a defiant protestor who disappeared after years of railing against those very tours.

What begins as separate schemes collides into one chaotic odyssey: three furious women, a truck full of kidnapped bachelors, and Lefty—the last of his species, a snail with one slim chance at survival. But as Russia’s invasion shatters everything, their mission tangles with something darker, stranger, and heartbreakingly real.

Endling is a dazzling, razor-edged novel that blurs comedy and catastrophe, fiction and fact—a portrait of love, absurdity, and endurance in the shadow of war, and the stories we tell to keep going when the world splits apart.